The Trouble With Vista - Hard disks and Photos
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7. Excessive hard disk activity
Many users have commented with concern about how often Vista appears to access their hard drives. Microsoft have explained this phenomenon as a combination of the SuperFetch, Search Indexer and Disk Defragmenter features.
SuperFetch is designed to speed systems up by using unused RAM as a cache. Vista fills it with data from the most frequently used applications, supposedly anticipating what might be needed in the near future. This results in hard drive activity whenever RAM is available for this purpose.
Search Indexer automatically and continuously monitors user-defined areas of the hard disk for changes to the data. This enables rapid access to commonly used files and applications via the Instant Search box, at the cost of near-continuous hard disk grinding. The problem here is that by default the indexed directories include application-specific folders that change frequently but are of no relevance to the vast majority of users. This is an issue Microsoft could easily have avoided by modifying the default behavior.
Disk Defragmenter is also configured by default to operate automatically to a schedule in the background, resulting in excessive hard disk activity at unexpected times. In fact, when you consider that in the out-of-the-box configuration these three background processes can be in near-continuous competition for access to a system's hard drives, it's amazing that Vista works as well as it does.
8. Freezing photo gallery
One frequent complaint has been that Vista's new Photo Gallery application freezes up from time to time. Photo Gallery is more than a simple image viewer, offering basic and non-destructive editing functions such as red-eye removal and simple histogram adjustments. This extra functionality is welcome, but not at the expense of an image viewer that works.
So that's what's wrong with Vista. Part two of this article will consider what steps users can take to improve the Vista experience, and will go on to consider Microsoft's long-term strategy to deal with the poor reputation of their flagship operating system.
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